“Like in the movie 2001?”
“Classic film!” Walter laughed. “It’s similar in a way; what I can see is a baby girl, I think. It’s like a black hole in reverse. A kind of birth in the cosmos.”
Walter really did need to speak to someone. I decided to press him. “Listen, Walter, Nik would be happy to speak to you. I think he could help you. What he experienced is not precisely the same as you, but he found a way to… to survive.”
“Survive,” repeated Walter.
Mere survival didn’t seem like a great offer, I realized. “He is also happy. Very much so.”
I didn’t add that he seemed to have become almost autistic in his behavior. Walter would find that out for himself if he met with him.
I went on: “He will make as much money selling art as he ever made selling records.” By then I had sold at least ten of Old Nik’s pictures for between twenty and two hundred thousand pounds. I knew Walter didn’t care that much for money, but I was making a practical point. Nik would make a good living working as an artist, despite his afflictions. “You should meet him. He will help you, I’m sure of it.”
“Can I come to your place and see his work?”
“Of course you can,” I replied. I felt I’d made a start.
Walter arrived at my flat two weeks later; the summer of 1996 was drawing to an end. When I saw him face-to-face, I thought he looked different. Usually so self-consciously cool—like one of those carelessly handsome young male models-actors in a perfume commercial—he was now uncharacteristically eager, and seemed younger. I was reminded of how he had been as a kid when I described my hallucinogenic adventures. Whatever was going on had shaken him.
Walter looked at a few of Old Nik’s paintings and drawings at my flat. There was one in particular that caught his eye. A huge angel filled almost the entire canvas, and unusually this particular painting was almost monotonal; there was no color, no relief from the apocalyptic vision. But what caught Walter’s eye was the face of a child, neither male nor female—a kind of cherub-seraphim—who seemed to live within the flowing robes of the huge angel. He drew my attention to it.
“This face,” he said with restrained excitement. “This is very much like the face I see in the starburst when I get my sound attacks. It’s a familiar face. It’s half child, half angel.”
“Are you sure you’re not seeing your own 2001 star child, yet to be born?” I laughed. “Have you and Siobhan been discussing plans to have a family?”
Walter smiled and looked at me. He looked down and shook his head almost shyly.
Poor me. Poor Louis Doxtader. As the moment approaches when Walter Karel Watts meets his hero Nikolai Andréevich, I can feel myself, and my great secret, fading inevitably into the background of this story. I sit in my aerie to write. In the last few days of my writing here in the south of France the weather has been sunny and the view clear all the way to the sea. My collie dog Bingo, rescued by Siobhan from a rather cruel farmer in Ireland, sits at my feet, breathing deeply, staying cool in a shady corner, but the window is wide open and a breeze is blowing. This morning we walked together in the small botanical reservation behind the hilltop village of Châteauneuf, and tried to avoid crushing the exquisite purple, yellow, and blue wildflowers growing there. Already shimmering, they were set sparkling further with the fluttering of pale blue, brown-red, and white butterflies of various sizes. As I threw a stick high in the air for Bingo, I spotted what looked like yet more butterflies hanging in the sky in the distance above the mountains behind the château and monastery of Gourdon, thirteen hundred meters above the sea and about fifteen kilometers away. There were a dozen or more hang gliders, some swooping, some as still as hummingbirds, working the vortex rising along the ridge of the mountain.
That was one of the things Walter had loved most about Old Nik’s film when he was a young teenager: it was the first time he had seen a hang glider. In the movie, as Maud had described when she came to visit me, he leaps from a mountaintop in a hang glider and soars above a huge lake. This was set up to illustrate how Nikolai Andréevich had been spiritually liberated by the abusive privations he had to undergo in the story.
So I fixed a meeting and in September Maud and Nik turned up at the flat where Walter got to meet his childhood hero.
“My husband, Nikolai.” Maud ushered Old Nik into the light-filled living room that served as my gallery. His once golden hair was now completely gray, white in places but now long, curly, and luxurious. I guessed that Maud had persuaded him to start washing it. He had a scruffy beard. As he looked around the room and saw some of his own work displayed, his eyes widened in surprise and he was suddenly very attentive. His expression was wary; he was on alert, it seemed.
“I am glad to see you again,” I said. We shook hands, and his grip was weak. I turned to Maud. “Thanks for this, Maud. Walter will be here soon.”
When Walter arrived he sensed Nik was frail, and took charge, taking his arm and standing with him to look at the paintings. They spoke quietly together, but I overheard some snatches of their conversation. It seemed Old Nik had become something of a pedant. He was correcting almost every reminiscence Walter brought up.
“No, no, no,” I heard Nik say firmly. “It was May twenty-seventh. That’s when we did Batley Variety Club.”
“That was recorded at De Lane Lea, not Olympic.”
“No, we never played in Hungary or Czechoslovakia.”
“We were managed by Carlton Entertainments. Our production manager was a little snot called Frank.”
“Maud’s work? You must ask her.”
At this I turned to Maud. “Yes, what was your work? Do you still work?”
“I looked after my husband’s affairs at home, his studio, his clothes, his archive, and so on. Frank Lovelace looked after the road work.”
Walter looked over to me and grinned. It was fun to imagine Frank as a young runner, fetching cups of tea for Old Nik, and hailing taxis for him.
“You two can stay here and talk if you like,” I offered. “I’ll take Maud to Richmond Park, it’s a pleasant day.”
“No.” Walter turned to Nik, tilting his head to invite an answer. “Will we go to the park? It will be good to get some air.”
As Walter guided Old Nik out to the lobby and stood by the lift, Maud and I caught each other’s eye. There were two generations of rock star, both regarded by their fans as inviolable, powerful, arrogant, successful, and potent. We knew that both of them shared the same difficulties with fame. As the lift doors closed on the two musicians, Walter raising his hand to wave, they looked for a moment like father and son.
It was a weird moment for me. I felt a little jealous. I had wanted to be the one who unlocked the box for Walter. I knew that Andréevich would help, and I had introduced them. But I felt I might be losing Walter.
What would happen between them? Maud and I chatted about all kinds of things, but we both knew that in our minds we were asking the same questions.
What was Old Nik saying to Walter?
What was Walter saying to his hero, what was he asking him? How were they getting on?
What useful advice could the old rock star turned film star possibly pass on to the young, deeply rooted, humble, and practical pub rock artist who was my Rain’s dear old school friend Walter?
What had Old Nik learned from his visions?
Would anything that passed between them break the link between Walter and Siobhan that I prayed was loose enough already to fail, opening a way for Rain to tell the fool she loved him, and always had? That might be too much to ask for.
One thing was certain with the benefit of hindsight: from the day of his meeting with Andréevich, Walter began to turn his back on his old life.
Chapter 4
As I awoke this morning, sixty-seven years old, I asked myself what I most wanted for my birthday present.
What first came into my mind was so absurd that I find it hard to share it here. I wanted to change one th
ing in my past, something I had done of which I was terribly ashamed. Yet if I had been able to grant myself that wish, this story would have no ending. Indeed, there would be no story to tell.
But let me give away a single picture here. It is a wedding. A pub rock wedding. The wedding. This was the wedding that, because Harry was really not well-off, was paid for entirely by me. Godfather me, in godfather role. So in a sense this was my wedding as much as it was the joining of Walter and Siobhan. There were flowers, there was good food, but the crowd was small. The solemnities were over and we were in a garden somewhere. There was music and Walter was on the stage with the Stand. There were pretty girls. Two in particular come to mind. Selena and her old school friend Floss. Floss, the one with a blackened front tooth? There were other very pretty girls. Crow’s wife Agneta was one of them and her posse of gorgeous blonde buddies from Gothenberg became a blur of feminine intoxication.
“Make sure you bring some decent gear, Lou,” Crow had instructed. “Agneta likes that Bomber gear.”
Crow meant the horse tranquilizer, ketamine. I was the presiding tranquilizer-in-chief at the wedding of Walter and Siobhan, so it isn’t surprising I don’t remember much about it. But I have been told by my host here in France that I did something very, very bad. Something she alone witnessed. She urged me to come clean. And so I agreed to write, to try to explain, to try to unravel it all. That’s why I’m here. For myself as much as anything else. I wish my life was as simple as Bingo’s. I ruffle his head. Waiting his entire life to catch a rolled-up ball of paper, he is the exact opposite of tranquilized: sharp, alert, growing older like his new master, but never ready to give up.
As I looked from the window of my aerie, it was as if the entire world were bathed in cloud or mist. I could barely see the road that runs past this house down to the valley. In such gloom I could not write a word. Bingo ate his breakfast eagerly, and tried to cheer me up, but as I walked him around the garden I began to feel damp. Damp and incomplete.
Happily, a little later, the sun broke through and I sat at my desk. Bingo seemed thrilled that I was in motion, albeit merely with my pen and paper.
Does it matter that the tale I recount is now all about me when in fact I promised it would be about my young hero Walter and his hero Old Nik? Today I turned sixty-seven! Laugh. Cry. A billion souls have passed this way before. Hence, Old Nik’s hosts of harvesting angels perhaps? For this is the one-way traffic of being alive; at the end of this road is death, sweet or agonizing, welcomed or dreaded, it is inevitable.
To understand the tragic and transcendent events that followed, you need to understand the Irish dimension to this story. So let me take you back to Waterford where Siobhan and her little sister Selena grew up in the care of their father Michael.
Selena was the most beautiful girl at that wedding. She went to the wedding with eyes only for Walter, but now she waits for me upstairs.
She has told me all about their childhood. Michael’s wife, her mother, mother to the two girls, had died when Selena was born and Siobhan had been just ten years old. Her father Michael was too worn out to be a single parent. He was a drinker and a bully, a man with a great and grand heart. But he had no understanding that a punch from him—one that might propel an adversary from one end of the public bar to the other, and where that adversary might crash laughing, ready to bounce back with an equal blow of his own—such a punch might kill a young child. He did not know his own strength; neither did he know when drunk that his elder daughter was not his wife.
In even more unhappy times, having run with their father from Waterford to West Acton in west London to impose on kindly relatives and attend better free schools (free of priests at least), tragedy struck. One evening in 1984 eighteen-year-old Siobhan wiped the blood from her lips, sucked on a tooth that had been temporarily loosened, and glared fearlessly at her father. I picture him standing, swaying slightly, holding his bruised right fist still clenched, his temper—having risen—now wavering before him. And, as I imagine it, he saw and felt it as though it were a sheet of shimmering ice or glass stretching out across the small, neat sitting room. He could hardly see his elder daughter standing defiantly before him.
Little Selena stabbed Michael Collins in the back, and he died. Siobhan was now a mother as a result of murder, and it would be several years before she felt sure enough of herself, and of her strength to survive in a world of predatory men with flying fists, to let Selena find her own way.
One evening in the spring of 1994 Siobhan, in her late twenties, felt free at last to drink and dance, and as Rain’s guest found herself standing at the bar in Dingwalls, slightly tipsy, watching Walter blowing his harmonica, adopting his famous “stand,” driving the girls wild. Realizing that this handsome young pub rock star had a way with words that was redolent in some endearing way of all she could recall of the gentle south west of Ireland she had known before her father lost his wife, her mother, and then lost his mind, Siobhan decided she would marry Walter. She was older than her new man by one year.
Chapter 5
Here on the hills of Grasse, Selena and I usually sit mid-morning in the shade of three huge palm trees to drink coffee, scoff a pain au chocolat, and gaze at the distant, shining sea. She asks how my writing is going, and where my memories are misty she fills in the gaps. I knew that she had been one of those Dingwalls girls at the bar who had set their hearts on being Walter’s lover, or even wife. In a way it had been best that her beloved older sister had married him, and not one of Agneta’s spectacular Nordic blondes. She never betrayed any ill feeling toward Siobhan.
The older sister had found a good, kindhearted man in Walter, one who might have poetry in his soul. She married him and planned to shape him soon into the poetic kind of genius she deep down knew he surely could become. I suppose Siobhan and I were united in this belief in Walter’s endless potential, but we never spoke of it. It might be possible that from the dark and vile reality of all she suffered as a girl she had taken up with dreams and fantasies and schemes. We’ll soon find out how far her great ambitions took her; indeed, how far they took her man.
And so the opera can begin, with voices, singing and speaking, and music made from every kind of noise that man and nature ever generated, here combined. There will be an opera.
You will imagine this evocative sound, and this music, just as I heard it for the first time. In fact, I make the claim that my aberrations may have played a part. As Walter’s godfather, let me play God Himself and make a bridge between you and him, allowing me to let you right inside Walter’s mind. Just for a while we float above the chronology, the passing years, months, and hours of the story I have told so far, and occupy the timeless space inside a man’s creative soul. We hear the deep vibrations of his still young mind as he begins to search inside the universe of childhood, its noise and chaos, in some hope of order, and some meaning for us all, his audience of the future, past, and here and now.
A three-year-old boy. A terrifying storm. Wind, waves, blowing gravel, trees bending and cracking, occasional small crashes as debris is blown through the air and lands nearby. After a minute or two the storm subsides. We are left with the sound of the sea, or rather the seaside on a quiet afternoon. A beach somewhere. A few children playing. Distant calls, parent to child, child to child. Seagulls of course, but also a distant radio. The sound of galloping hooves on soft sand. Thudding rhythmically, two horses, breathing hard. Jumps. The whip. Faster. Faster. Then splashing through shallow water. The horses arrive, whinny, rise on two legs, then thud down again, blow air, turn, and ride away.
For a long time, I think, I was the only person Walter trusted to see his first “soundscape” description. It evoked poignant but powerful images from his infancy. It revealed the fear of horses he had felt, and the sadness too, aroused by his childish notion that his parents might love their horses more than him. It’s possible of course he might have shared it with Siobhan, but I saw no evidence that she knew about Walter’
s mental aberrations. I wondered if Andréevich would have been able to break out of his self-obsession long enough to read them. Probably not. But I did believe he would help Walter carry the burden of an overactive imagination, or even the psychic connections with the people around him; acting as a kind of counselor, based on his own experience, he might help Walter to feel less afraid.
Chapter 6
Some godparents merely send modest presents to their charges at Christmas and on birthdays. I may have taken my obligation to Walter too far, but I did feel it to be a spiritual imperative. Andréevich was no more meant to be a replacement father than I was. I merely felt the opportunity for Walter and the old man to meet had been placed in front of me.
Harry tried to be a good father to Walter, but musicians seem lost on several fronts when it comes to parenting. Harry had fans! No one could play the Preludium in E Major the way he could. Many organists shifted on the bench as though they had a carrot up their arse. But from behind, Harry was elegant. He seemed strong. He was a performer.
“My dad did try,” Walter once told me. “But he practiced for hours in his studio. Then he would be in and out, in a dress suit. Gone. He was rarely out of bed before I set off for school.”
There was a silence then. But Walter did not appear resentful. He was not a neglected child. Harry had charged me, not to be surrogate, but to double up, as it were.
“He was not a snob about music,” Walter continued. “He just couldn’t accept that we loved what had come out of Memphis and New Orleans. I love him, Louis.”
Walter looked at me and for a moment I saw the boy I had once coached in the art of manly absurdity while Harry was away on tour. We played awful football, clumsy tennis, swam like dogs, then he’d be as properly shattered as I was when I got him home.
Walter is handsome. He has the ruggedness of the instigator of trouble, but none of the swagger. He doesn’t normally talk much.
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